


the first cut

by distractionpie



Series: Band Of Brothers Week [11]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Love Letters, M/M, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 17:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11764518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: David's heart leads him too easily astray.(Band of Brothers Week 2 Day 5 - Angst)





	the first cut

David’s mother had told him he had no reason to be nervous about starting high school. After all, he’d been top of his classes since kindergarten and getting A’s since they started giving letter grades - he’d even been offered the chance to skip a grade which was proof he was ready, even if his parents had declined the offer on the grounds that it might push him too hard and stunt his emotional development.

He had thought about telling her that it wasn’t the classes he was worried about, but he knew if he said anything she’d just fuss and worry, and she’d already got embarrassingly emotional at breakfast about him being all grown up.

He doesn’t _feel_ grown up. He feels small. He hadn’t had any difficulty getting a seat on his new bus, he lived near the start of the route, but now it’s filled up around him and it’s loud. There are people shouting and swearing, three girls on the back row are arguing fiercely about a show David’s mom says isn’t appropriate for him to watch, new arrivals are pushing to get seats with their friends, but the space next to David is still empty.

He wishes that it would be filled by somebody he knows, but most of his middle school friends are going to the prep school across town, the prep school David had thought he’d be joining them at until his parents had decided that public school would ‘improve his personal development’. He wishes he could get out his book, immerse himself in Middle Earth until it was time for homeroom and there’d be a teacher keeping the peace, but he remembers the way some of his classmates sneered _‘geek_ ’ and _‘loser’_ at him in middle school. His father has rained hell down on the school board the afternoon David had come home with bruises on his arm from being shoved to the blacktop and admitted what was going on, but even after the bullies had stopped David had known it was only because the teachers forced them not because they’d changed their opinions of him. The last thing he needed was to start high school looking like more of a target than he already was. Fortunately when someone does sit by him it's a tall boy carrying a guitar case who is more interested in talking with his friends in the row in front than in noticing David exists.

Getting off the bus doesn't help. Although the people in the foyer aren't packed so close to him there's so many more of them. David tries to stick to the outer edges of the halls where people aren’t moving so fast, but there are too many people opening their lockers and so he keeps having to slip into the centre where he’s pushed along by the masses. He leans up to read the room numbers as he’s dragged past, but it’s hard to see over the heads of the people around him. He’d been assured that his father and uncles had all not hit their final growth spurt until their late teens but that knowledge doesn’t help him right now as he pushes up onto his toes to look for room 161.

The door nearest to him reads 109, totally wrong, and he’s just unfolded the site map that was mailed out in his welcome pack when someone crashes into him and David doesn’t think it’s deliberate, surely he’s done nothing that could provoke such aggression already, but it still sends him sprawling to the ground, map and schedule flying from his arms.

His knees sting from hitting the ground, but the real pain is the humiliation, of knowing that this is the first impression he’s making on the people he’s going to be spending the next four years of his life with. Clumsy, awkward David Webster, he can feels tears welling at the thought and he bites the inside of his cheek as he blinks rapidly to try and fight them back. He’s in high school now, the last thing he needs to add crybaby to the list of embarrassing attributes.

People trample past him as he tries to gather up his things. Somebody steps on his map, leaving a shoe print across the centre of the page, but nobody stops to help until:

“Here,” a hand appears in front of his face.

David looks up.

The boy standing before him is haloed by the fluorescent ceiling lights, clad in skinny jeans and a t-shirt with a logo David doesn’t recognise, with hair the kind of artfully disheveled David has only ever seen in his cousin’s fashion magazines. Everything about him is the kind of cool that David has never known whether to admire or fear. He’s smirking, like maybe it's a trick, but when David warily accepts the hand he’s pulled to his feet without any trap being sprung.

“You okay?” he asks.

David nods, running his hands over himself to try and brush away any dirt. “I’m fine,” he mumbles, “I just... tripped.”

The boy laughs. “More like got tripped. Nobody watches where they’re fucking going here, do they? I’m Joe, by the way.”

“David Webster.”

“Where are you headed, Webster?”

David smooths out his schedule, tracing his finger across the row for Monday until he finds the information he needs. “Homeroom with Mr Sink,” he reads, “Room 161.”

“Huh, me too,” Joe says, flinging an arm over David’s shoulders. “C’mon.”

He pushes David through the crowds with confidence, as if he already knows where he’s going even though if he’s in David’s class he must be a freshman too. It's so much easier to traverse the corridors with the burden of navigation lifted from his shoulders and another body to break the tide of people.

Together they reach the right room much faster than David would have alone, and they walk into the room, Joe’s arm still wrapped around his shoulders.

“Hey Lieb!” someone calls out as they enter and David frowns. He hasn’t done a great job of keeping up with his German studies over the summer, but he’s pretty sure that means love which is a weird thing to be shouting across a classroom. Instead of moving away from the crazy person though, Joe steers them both across the room to here the guy who shouted is sat.

“Hey guys,” he says. “Never thought I’d see the day you’d all be on time.”

The group at the table laugh. “Well nobody’s surprised you’re last, Joe,” one of them says.

“I have a reputation to maintain,” Joe replies. “And I trust you guys to find us a spot.”

That’s when David realises that the table seats four and three of the spaces are already occupied, the people in them looking to one another with frowns as they register David’s presence. He’s an intruder here and he steps back before he has to be told that he’s unwelcome. It’s a mistake he’s made before, and it’ll be easier to act like he doesn’t care if the move comes from him.

He scans the room and sees an entirely empty table near the back - there are spaces nearer but he knows other people might be holding spots for their friends and he doesn’t want to be told to go away so he shrugs Joe’s arm away and hitches his backpack up his shoulders.

“Uh... thanks for helping me find the room, Joe. I’ll talk to you later,” he says optimistically, “But I’m going to go over there because I’d rather sit near the back.”

It’s a lie. He always tries to sit at the front of classrooms, there’s no way he’ll be able to read anything written up on the board from back there, but it’s homeroom not calculus so he hopes he’ll be okay. If he’s really lucky the teacher will decide to implement a seating plan and he might get moved to the front _and_ not have to worry about if anybody will want to sit by him.

At least people do sit by him as the room fills up, although they don’t have a lot of choice since it quickly becomes clear there will be no free spaces.

Their homeroom teacher, Mr Sink, is an imposing man who talks in a voice that can only be described as bellowing despite the fact he’s speaking at an indoor volume and the class is mostly quiet. David wants to take notes, but nobody else is doing that and he wants to avoid looking strange even more. They’re being given an extra long homeroom session that extends over their first class period to help them get settled in and get to know each other, although when David checks his timetable he sees that the class that’s be cancelled to allow that is literature, which he’d much prefer to be in.

The first icebreaker task is group quiz, but the people at his table are clearly more interested on catching up on what they’ve done on their vacation, so David pulls the worksheet over and gets on with it alone. He doesn’t think they even get grades for homeroom, but he’s not sure enough to risk doing poorly.

Task number two is a game of two truths and lie, and this time David finds he’s the ones doing nothing as the trio he’s sat with make a cursory attempt to include him in their first round but rapidly disregard him and start saying things that only somebody who already knew them well would have a hope of knowing the truth of.

The third task involves going around the room in alphabetical order introducing themselves to the whole room and sharing something they’ve learned in the first two exercises and he can’t ever remember feeling the level of relief he feels when the bell sounds in the middle of Edward “Just call me Ed please” Tipper’s turn. He doesn’t know what he’d have said if his turn had some round.

David’s next class is world history and Joe is there too, which means he has to go find a seat near the back again or give away the fact he told a stupid lie. Fortunately there are no silly games in this class and the teacher shows them a ten minute video about the industrial revolution and then tells them to complete two pages of tasks from their books in the remaining forty minutes. David completes everything they’ve been asked to do in twenty-five and for the last fifteen watches Joe whisper with his friends without ever even turning a page in his textbook and then the professor calls upon him and instead of floundering Joe replies with the most succinct and enlightened explanation of how the industrial revolution instigated modern labour movements that David has ever heard.

The rest of the day goes similarly, bar a brief respite when Joe turns out to be taking an extra art class instead of any of the language options in the period David has German. Although, the teacher holds David back at the end and tells him that he’s going to email the school office and recommend David transfer out and just sit the exam at the end, because it turns out most of his classmates didn’t study any foreign language in middle school and so it’s a beginner level class covering things that David had mastered when he was eleven.

The bus home is just as loud and chaotic, but David is too tired to do anything but lean his head against the window and enjoy the way the bus gets more and more peaceful as people disembark until finally there’s only half a dozen people left end it’s his stop.

He’s obscenely glad that none of his classes have assigned homework yet, because all he wants to do when he gets up to his room is lie down on his bed and stay there until dinner. If high school is like this every day he’s not sure how he’s going to cope - he got to sleep in half an hour later than usual because his new school is nearer than his old one but he still feels like all of the energy has been sucked right out of him.

He’s not sure how much time has passed when he wakes to the sound of his mother’s voice calling him down to dinner but he barely feels rested at all as he joins his family at the table.

His mother is smiling nervously at him as they start to eat. “How was school?”

He shrugs, reaching across the table for dressing for his salad. “Alright.”

She frowns at that answer and David realises he needs to try harder than that if he doesn’t want to worry her. “Did you make any friends?”

David frowns, thinking of Joe, but even he isn’t socially unaware enough to think that one brief conversation and several hours of subtle staring make them friends. “It’s the first day, mom,” he deflects. “I haven’t even met everybody in my classes yet.”

“You have been talking to them though?” she asks.

“Joan,” David’s father cautions. “High school is a big change, I’m sure he’ll settle in with time. Now, John, how was your first day back?”

David is grateful for the respite as John chatters on about middle school and Ann complains that it’s not fair her school doesn’t resume until next week because staying home is no fun without her brothers. His mom has made meatloaf and normally that’s one of David’s favourites but he can barely taste it, although he does clear his plate, and he knows he must look as exhausted as he feels because his father excuses him without waiting for John (the slowest eater David has ever met) and Ann (who keeps forgetting she’s supposed to be eating and not just talking) to finish.

He goes straight to bed.

*

The next day is slightly easier. The bus ride is still loud and nerve wracking and when he gets to homeroom he can already see that people are defaulting to the same seats they were in yesterday, which leaves David with the group who ignore him - this time they’re talking about some TV show he’s never heard of, and part of thinks he should note the name so he can watch it and have something in common with them, but he’s not sure he’ll actually have the time to fit it in once homework starts.

Knowing where some of the classrooms are serves as a useful frame of reference for navigating the halls, although the crowds still shunt him back and forth and he’s almost late for calculus just because people keep pushing him in the wrong direction.

Joe is in fewer of his Tuesday classes, but they are in the same period for government and David is startled when he slips into the desk beside him.

A glance around the room shows that none of Joe’s buddies from homeroom are in the class but there are plenty of other people with empty seats beside them and David has already seen that Joe is popular and came from the main feeder middle school which means he knows half their year group already. But he’s sitting with David.

He’s also staring rather unnervingly. David reaches up, wiping his face nervously. He can’t think of any reason for him to be a mess, but he also can’t think of any reason why Joe would be looking at him.

Joe snickers. “Your face is fine,” he says, in a not entirely reassuring tone. “I was just wondering how come you don’t know anyone?”

David flushes. He’d hoped it would be less obvious, having no friends didn’t make a good impression. “I, we moved across town when I was in seventh grade but my parents didn’t want me to switch schools at a weird time, but I’d have needed two buses to get to the high school my old friends are at so my parents decided here was better because it’s closer.” He knows there had been more to it than that, what with the bullying and the issues of private versus public school, but that’s the simple version.

“Urgh, two buses,” Joe says, wrinkling his nose. “I had to take the bus in middle school, so lame. I live near enough to walk here though, which means I get to sleep in.”

The teacher arrives then. The lesson is a badly put together powerpoint presentation, followed by writing up some questions based on what is in their books. It turns out Joe doesn’t actually have the textbook for government yet, asks if he can share with David and David can hardly say no. He’s a little worried waiting for Joe to finish the pages will slow him down -David reads faster than anybody else he knows except his mom- but Joe does an okay job of keeping pace, mostly because a quick glance to the side shows his answers are half the length of what David has written.

David frowns as he reads through another simplistic passage in their shared textbook that explains voting boundaries without even a mention of gerrymandering or the impact those boundaries could have.

“Stupid, isn’t it?” Joe comments. “I mean, carry on letting people go through life thinking the government really works like this and the next thing you know Donald Trump’ll be president.”

David scoffs, he knows it's rude but it just escapes from his mouth. “That’s absurd.”

“Okay, that’s a little over the top,” Joe concedes. “But this is totally the worse class we’ve had so far.”

It’s true. Mr Evans doesn’t seem to know the material at all and he’s totally failing to keep control of the class, as proven by the fact their conversation is being masked by the sounds of two of their classmates loudly arguing about whether George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were friends or rivals. “Don’t jinx it,” David complains, and Joe laughs loud enough that Mr. Evans turns away from the arguing duo to glare at them instead.

David normally hates it when teachers are mad at him, in general they’re his best allies in the war zone that is school, but in this case he finds he doesn’t really mind.

*

Over the the next two weeks David finds himself making Joe his lighthouse. They don’t talk much, Joe has his many friends and David has his many anxieties about getting a head start on homework to keep him busy, but he maintains an awareness of Joe’s presence. They share most classes, although government is the only one Joe has no better desk partners available, and occasionally when a teacher or a classmate says or does something dumb Joe will look over his shoulder to catch David’s eye and grin like they’re in on a joke together.

They aren’t friends, but David finds himself casually mentioning things that Joe did to his mother when she asks about his day, and he knows he shouldn’t misrepresent the situation but Joe so often is the most memorable thing about his days. David is starting to like his classes, but Joe is the only thing making the between times bearable.

He needs some way of showing it that won’t risk him looking foolish. He’s working on his first set of literature readings in study hall that afternoon when inspiration strikes.

*

David missed the school bus last night following Joe through the crowds to find his locker and then waiting for the hall to clear out so that he could slip his letter through the vents, but it was worth it because it also gave him a spot where he could wait in the morning and watch Joe find it.

He’s just starting to get antsy, he’s going to be late if he waits much longer, when Joe and his friends finally saunter down the hall. For a moment David worries Joe is going to walk right past his locket and that David will have to try and catch him at lunch or miss it altogether if Joe goes to his locker in a passing period, but Joe stops and says, “Shit. I need my calculator.”

His friends all hang around, David wishes they’d go on without him but he supposes that wouldn’t make them very good friends. The locker door stops him from seeing the moment Joe finds the envelope, but it’s in his hand as he shuts his locker and shoves his calculator into his pocket.

“What’s that?” the tallest of Joe’s friends asks.

“Dunno,” Joe says, “But it’s got my name on it. Do they put detention slips in your locker like this?”

David waits with baited breath as Joe rips open the envelope. He pulls the paper out and takes a deep breath. “ _Dear Joe_ ,” he reads.

Oh _no_. He's going to read it aloud. David gulps and presses his back against the lockers, he’s determined to see this through despite the dread rising in his gut but he hadn’t intended his sentiments for the eyes -or ears- of anyone other than Joe. He hadn't specified anywhere that the contents was private, but only because he’d thought it obvious enough not to need specifying.

“ _I could write that you are my hero,”_

“Hell of a detention slip, Lieb,” one of his friends remark, but the others shush him.

 _“-that in the short time I’ve known you you have captivated my attention and ensnared my mind, your words have become the melody of my waking hours and your features the light in my dreams-”_ his friends all ‘ooohhh’ at this, and a few moments later David realises how they must be interpreting it and flushes. “- _but none of these clichés would be sufficient.”_ Joe looks up from the page, dragging a hand through his hair, saying, “Fuck, whatever this is, it’s long,” before he moves onto the next paragraph.

 _“As the oceans’ wondrous depths contain multitudes so do you, profounder -_ is that even a real word?- _and more complex than could be imagined just from a glimpse of the surface. Like a shark you cut through the halls, bringing awe to our whole cohort, and like a shark you are so much more intelligent and tender than ignorant people believe.”_ Joe cuts himself off with a burst of laughter. “Like a _shark_!” he repeats, rounding on his friends. “Alright, which one of you fuckers wrote this?”

David’s fists curl into the straps of his backpack. How can Joe think one of them wrote it? David had no intention of revealing himself, but surely if one of Joe’s friends felt so profoundly as David did now they would be close enough to him to say something directly.

“Not me!” says the redhead - he’s not one of the guys in the shared homeroom and David doesn’t know his name. “Keep going, I wanna here how this ends.”

“Duh, it’s clearly a marriage proposal,” comments Wayne, who sits in front of David in biology.

“Our little Lieb all grown up,” adds the guy who David thinks might be called Charlie.

“Shut up!” Joe says, “Although, shit, listen: _I know that you have a world of choices, you are surrounded each day by peers who have clearly appreciated your brilliance for far longer that I have had the chance to-”_

“Brilliance?”

“Don’t worry Lieb, I appreciate the shit out of you.”

 _“-and I expect nothing from you, I only strive to express the sentiments you have awoken in me, that you might know the strength of impact our brief encounter has had upon me,”_ Joe bites his lip and shrugs. “So that’s a thing.”

“That’s it?” Wayne makes a grab for the letter, but to David’s slight relief Joe holds it out of his grasp.

“Yeah, doesn’t it say who it’s from?”

“It says, _Affectionately, Your admirer,”_ Joe admits, “But c’mon... Was is you Malark? You always think you’re so fucking hilarious.”

“It wasn’t me,” the redhead protests. “Was it any of you guys?”

Joe’s friends exchange glances, then all start shaking their heads.

“Somebody is in _lurve_ with you,” Wayne adds.

“A secret admirer, for Joe?” Charlie shakes his head. “I cannot believe this is happening in our actual real lives, what the fuck?”

“Whatever,” Joe scoffs and then he screws the page up, all of David’s carefully crafted words crumpled like so much trash and tossed to the ground as Joe struts off down the corridor still laughing.

David screws his eyes shut. He’d always planned that one day he’d teach Ann that it was stupid to cry over boys, but apparently he hasn’t even got the message himself.

He ought to go to homeroom, but Joe will be there and the thought of sitting and listening to him and his friends laugh at David’s feelings, even if they were unaware of the fact they’d be rubbing it in his face, sounded like hell. Worse, it sounded like a surefire way to sabotage any hopes of every being seen as anything less than an embarrassing loser because there was no way he could listen to that and keep his cool.

His parents would be disappointed if they found out he skipped class, worse than that they’d be worried, but David got good at excuses when he went through his middle school bout of skipping.

He only hopes the high school nurse is as sympathetic as the one he had in middle school.

He’ll have to face Joe again eventually, but he can hide away for a little while. At least until his eyes are dry.


End file.
